2009 Alina Liberman

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Fusiform Face Are Development Throughout Adolescence

The Fusiform Face Area (FFA) is a region in the occipitotemporal cortex that preferentially responds to visual face stimuli than place or object stimuli. In Golarai et al.(2007), they found that the right FFA was significantly smaller in children (ages 7-11) than adolescents (12-16) or adults (>18). This size difference was not present in the face-selective the superior temporal sulcus (STS) or the object-selective lateral occipital complex area (LOC). The place-selective parahippocampal place area (PPA) was also significantly smaller in children. These results support a region and category specific development of high-level visual cortex for faces and places. An ongoing follow-up study replicated the right FFA results, showing a significant size difference between adolescents (12-16) and adults(>18). The current study had better spatial resolution and did not use any spatial smoothing on the data. Since many developmental FFA studies report smoothed group data (Passarotti et al., 2003; Scherf et al., 2007), I wanted to ask the following questions:

1. How would these results change if the same data was spatially smoothed and normalized (i.e. location, response amplitudes, and size of ROIs)?
2. Would the significant age affect for the size of the right FFA survive?

Background

Below is another example of a reinotopic map in a different subject.
Figure 2

Once you upload the images, they look like this. Note that you can control many features of the images, like whether to show a thumbnail, and the display resolution.

Figure 3

Methods

Measuring object selective cortex

Lo maps were obtained in 5 subjects using two localizer scans

Subjects

Subjects were 14 healthy adolescents and 11 healthy adults .

MR acquisition

Data were obtained on a GE scanner.

MR Analysis

The MR data was analyzed using mrVista software tools.

Pre-processing

All data were slice-time corrected, motion corrected, and repeated scans were averaged together to create a single average scan for each subject. Et cetera.

Results

Retinotopic models in native space

Some text. Some analysis. Some figures.

Conclusions

Here is where you say what your results mean.

References - Resources and related work

References

Software